A datacenter is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression, etc.) and special security devices. Datacenters concentrate large numbers of processing systems within a small area in order to provide an efficient and optimal environment to operate the systems. Power, cooling and other management services can be provided more efficiently in a datacenter than if the systems were decentralized.
Continuing demands for increasing processing system capacity require that the datacenter must be designed for efficient power management, thermal management, configurational flexibility, and maintenance. These competing design considerations have led to the development of numerous systems, but the most common of these systems include the use of racks that support large numbers of components and are arranged side by side in rows.
In a typical datacenter as illustrated on FIG. 1, adjacent rack rows are placed face to face or back to back in order to create alternate hot aisles and cold aisles. Cold air pushed in the raised floor by the cooling system is supplied in the cold aisles in between of to adjacent rack rows facing each other through perforated floor tiles. Cold air is collected by the cooling fans of equipment in the racks and is expulsed at the back of the rack row in the hot aisles where two adjacent rack rows are back to back. Hot air is collected in the ceiling and circulates back to the cooling system. Alternating hot and cold aisles enable relatively efficient air flow management and cooling, while providing access aisles along the front and back of each row of racks to facilitate installation, reconfiguration and maintenance.
The aisles between the racks have a second function which is to allow personal circulation between the racks to gain access to the equipment for installation and maintenance operations.
Buildings are expensive, and machine room space is costly for companies. There is always the concern to reduce this cost by increasing as much as possible the number of machines contained in a given room (the “equipment density” of the room) to gain cost efficiency.
With the common room design as described above, one can noticed that although efficient, there is still a lot of space that is not used for host equipment. Overall it is around 30% and up to 50% of the floor space that is not used and cannot be used, as all the aisles, either hot or cold are and must remain free.
However, there remains the need for even more efficient rack systems that make more efficient use of the space in a given datacenter while still providing thermal management and configurational flexibility.
It would be desirable to have more efficient rack systems that utilize many standardized components, such as motherboards, hard disk drives, and PCI cards.
It would be even more desirable to have rack systems that increase the density of the processing system without overloading existing cooling systems.
The present invention offers such solution.